| "Stay in L.A." explores the role of hotels in the development of Los Angeles from the 1880s to the 1950s. The story told here treats hotels as significant "sites" of metropolitan change from within the larger context of a "global metropolis in the making." Ultimately, I argue that over the course of the city's history, hotels served as microcosms of the larger realm of urban public space, revealing and influencing transformations in the city's image and in the way Angelenos and tourists alike experienced the city. From the origin of resort hotels in the 1880s through the period of monumental hotel construction in the 1920s, hotels in Los Angeles reflected Eastern and Midwestern precedents both in form and in function. Just about the time when Los Angeles was emerging as a city of worldwide influence, symbolized in the city's hosting of the 1932 Summer Olympics, and coinciding with a halt in nationwide hotel construction, hotels in Los Angeles seemed to begin to capture the essence of a unique Los Angeles personality. By the 1950s, this urban personality included not only a sense of fantasy and glamour, such as in the spectacle of the hotel poolside scene, but also the increasing loss or erasure of urban public space.;In encapsulating this essential Los Angeles, the history of the city's hotels demonstrates (1) a gradual depersonalization in social interaction within urban public space; (2) a marked increase in the spectacular quality of the social and physical aspects of hotels, directly related to the culture and artifice of the Hollywood film industry; (3) continual efforts toward standardization and "modernization" in hotels that culminated in both the Modern aesthetic in architecture and the individualization of the hotel experience; and (4) a sustained, albeit increasingly more subtle, regime of segregation that organized city space. Transformations such as the individualization and segregation of the American social experience---developments most commonly attributed to the phenomenon of suburbanization---took place in downtown hotels as well as in suburban homes, despite the seamless image of hotels as sites of vibrant city life. |
